a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas.
oil on canvas.
W
ounded animals, even ones more tame than wild, are easier to look upon than feral boys with leaves and knots in their hair. Their blood, where it lingers in the air and stains the tip of her almost-snarl with flavor, is softer on her pallet than his has been. Their pain she can understand. It is the same ache, the same feel of flayed flesh, that churns round and round in her stomach like a newborn hurricane. She can feel it now on the tingle that moves from tongue, to throat, to stomach, when she starts to lay the tincture on the wildcat. And she tries not to grow poppies, and lilacs, and violets as bright as her mother’s eyes in the cracks of injury drawing out constellations in his fur.
Still the urge is there when she blinks her eyes onto the image of both life and death superimposed upon each other.
Danaë does not look at the boy again when the cheetah comes closer with eyes soft with pain, and promise, like a lamb who sees a unicorn instead of a lion slumbering. Each touch is gentle as she spreads the paste with her lips instead of magic. A part of her soul rejoices that she still has the ability to save a thing instead of consume it or raise it up from the belly of the dirt. Sometimes when she had ran through the forest, shoulder to shoulder with Isolt and a bramblebear, she had wondered if the same spore of life in her own chest was nothing but a cruel joke of her mother’s old-god magic.
She had wondered if she would ever save, ever consume, anything but death.
But she does not linger over the discovery of it when he steps close again and her paste runs down to shadows. The part of her clinging to a fake mortality hopes that she had been faster than his magic-- fast enough to prevent festering bacteria from healing inside the skin (and again she thinks, foolish, foolish, horse). The almost tether between boy and wildcat, the way their hearts stutter and beat almost in tune, tells that fake mortality to look away, look away, look away. Only wisteria lungs, and evergreen lungs, beat in tune with her own.
The shadows feel like a blessing from a god she does not believe in when they fill up again the space between them. Her body trembles as she pulls it from the lingering grasp of his magic. It is a tremble that has nothing to do with pain, or regret, or the chill of the darkness in the scar running through the forest. All the hair rises from her spine, like weeds instead of hair, when she shakes the tang of herbs and blood from her tongue.
And she has never felt like a thing so strange compared to her sister when she blinks (and again it’s the image of hollies from his eyes and lichen from his feathers). “Never.” She answers so softly that the darkness takes that too when she turns back into her forest.
Her tremble does not abate until the trees are woven so tightly together that her gallop must turn to a walk.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
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